“ – the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary,
for if they were written there, written out and not maintained by ellipses,
they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude …”
Jean Genet
Introduction to “Soledad Brother – The Prison Letters of George Jackson”

Pages

Sunday, 8 December 2013

The Art Of Collaboration - some thoughts

They say writing novels is a lonely pursuit. Well in an age of digital and self-publishing this is no longer true. There are a myriad of online writing communities, where you can get craft, publishing and technical advice or trial your work. With social media you get to converse with your readers before they buy your book, as they buy it (since they can just share the fat of their Amazon purchase with one click, while I've had people tweet a photo of my front cover), while they're reading it I've three people reading my short stories who are tweeting to me about them as they progress through the book) and finally of course when they've finished reading and want to continue the engagement either through a review or just talking to you about it. If like me you can't even draw stickmen, then you'll need to reach out to a designer to design your book cover for you. While if you want a bespoke website but have no coding skills, again like me, then you need to collaborate with a web designer.

So digital publishing is the age of interaction and collaboration. Earlier this year I collaborated
with Pixel Pixie Design on a video reading of one of my flash fiction stories,
seeking to tell a story in a different way. We're about to launch into our second collaborative project making a second video.

I've been used to collaborating, since I formerly wrote
plays for the stage. There I had the privilege of attending all rehearsals,
doing the warm up games with the actors, participating in the impro tasks as
the director found ways for them to discover their characters, without laying
down too many pre and pro-scriptions. It was a real skill to allow everyone to
bring their own creativity to the production, rather than just impose one
person's vision. There may well have been things I wanted to say about the
interpretation of 'my' play, but I didn't interrupt the process. I would never
bring them up directly with the actors and only rarely would I have a sidebar
chat with the director to feed in my input. I may have written the script, but
the actors had to bring it alive up on stage and I felt it best to trust to
their abilities rather than impose my own views. Any playwright who feels precious
about every word that they write, ought to bear in mind that an actor may trip
up over a word or line and just never get it right, for no logical reason at
all. Then the writer just has to let the line go. If that can happen to any
line in the play, then you realise that nothing is so precious as to be ring-fenced
from being cut. There may be no rhyme or reason to it, but that's just how
things can shake out.

What my theatre experiences taught me was it's vital to
allow every creative partner the space to bring their talents and vision to the
project. That way you maximise the chances for full synergy, that is the
finished piece being greater than the original conception and bigger than the
sum of the different creative parts that came together to produce it. I may
have written a text, Pixel Pixie may have animated design skills, but hopefully
the synthesis of our skills forged a piece that became more than a short story
and more than a kinetic typography video. The kinetic typography would
hopefully bring out things in the story less accessible to being read in print.
While the text would hopefully inform and reinforce just why kinetic typography
was being used as the medium and make the letters on screen resonate with
meaning.

But that creative space for each to pitch in is hard to
define. Unless you're all sat round a table with a blank piece of paper at the
beginning, (less and less likely in these days of virtual communication), the
someone will probably initiate the process with the concept. I had written my
story and had a vision of how it would look in kinetic typography. And it can
be hard to relinquish 'ownership' and throw it completely open to your partners
to do what they will with it. I'm sure that the whole spectrum of creative
working relationships exists, from the person with the brief so detailed and
the control freakery to prevent their partner from deviating from a single
detail, through to the person with a grain of an idea who turns to their
partner and asks them to go away and magically conjure the whole finished
piece. Clearly the ideal is somewhere between those two stifling poles.

There exists a further issue, that of different creative
artists not speaking the same language in order to communicate their take on
things and their vision. I can't even draw convincing stickmen with pen and
paper, let alone wield any design software programmes. And yet the process with
Pixel Pixie was without hiccup. The initial brief was no more than 6 lines
long, and then the full 275 word text itself. There was a process of initial
emails where we were just feeling around to understand each other's approach
and conception. And language. Pixel asked me about fonts and colours, but I was
keen for her to bring her own ideas to that. We talked about a voiceover of the
story, but I explained I felt that since the piece is about the breakdown of
language and the ability to recall words (due to developing asphasia), we
needed to show the actual breakdown of words and their transformation into
other words visually. We talked about morphing and transitions as I gradually
learned the concepts involved in Pixel's art and she learned about how the
story worked conceptually beyond the words that she was to transform and
animate. Finally we talked about imagining the viewing experience for an
audience not greatly exposed to this relatively new way of telling a story.
(Most kinetic typography videos are either infographics for a product or
service, or use song lyrics or film dialogue that are well know already).

So after these initial getting to know your art stages,
Pixel Pixie went away and created! It was the equivalent of a first draft of
any author's manuscript, only way more realised and closer to the final
version. The points we discussed on this first draft were already about
details, rather than overall conception. We did talk about colour, agreeing
that the basic colour scheme was correct, but that it could just be broken up a
bit more in places with other colour effects. The fonts we left untouched. The
exciting thing was not only had Pixie Pixel come up with the 'doodle' images in
the piece, but that these sparked off suggestions from both of us of other ones
we could add. The sparking off of a creative partner you just don't get working
on your own. Some of these image suggestions were tried, but I always couched
them with the caveat if they proved too difficult technically, or messed up the
transition, then to drop them as ideas. My training from the actors corpsing in
rehearsals standing me in good stead. Indeed there was one really nice image
idea we tried but had to abandon as it just didn't work into feeding into the
next frame.

A second draft required very few changes, the third draft
was for the soundtrack and we didn't make a single change to that. The fourth
and final draft was for the credits and in the space of 11 days the video was
complete from its starting blank screen. Even when it was finished, the
swapping of ideas didn't end there. I asked about how she went about finding
and applying the 'doodle' images as such information will inform my side of
things for the next kinetic typography project we will hopefully collaborate on
later in the year.

Here's the fruitful result of my collaboration with Pixel Pixie Design:

"Time After Time"

Click on image for free preview

Time travelling back from the future to kill someone in the past, in order to change the course of your own history. But when that future is one in which men are emasculated and the assassin is sent back into our own violent times, hilarity ensues...

"A,B&E"

Click on image for free preview

A moll is unfaithful to her gangster husband and flees in fear of her life. She washes up in Kavos on Corfu, tourist magnet for British youth offering sun, sex, cheap alcohol and a culture clash of ancient and modern. A love-hate letter to your own country written from exile

"Not In My Name"

click on image for free preview

Semtex semiology, internet grooming, ID theft by most unreliable of narrators - he who willfully misleads. Is that a siren wailing or bomb-blast tinnitus ?

What political action remains available after marches, petitions and the legislative process have been ridden over roughshod by the Executive? How do you make your voice heard? How do you ensure you shout the loudest? Through the deafening percussion of a bomb, that momentarily silences all else. That takes the very breath of life away.